I’ve been collecting editions of “The Year’s Best Science Fiction” for I don’t know how long. Wait, yes I do. I’ve been collecting them since I was a teenager, but those copies are long gone. I started collecting the editions on my bedroom bookshelf ever since I noticed them for sale at the local Half Price Books store, about 15 years ago.
I don’t usually read them cover-to-cover. I used to do that, when I bought each edition as soon as it was published, because I had a whole year to read each book and I was a voracious sci-fi reader. Now I’m more of a casual reader of fantasy and science fiction, as the genre has come to be known, and a little pickier than I used to be. If a story doesn’t hold my interest, I won’t finish it. And because I’ve got more than twenty editions on hand and each book is about 700 pages long, I tend to look for stories by writers I already know, read those, then put the book up on the shelf.
But that approach doesn’t expose me to new writers or new ideas, does it? No, it doesn’t. So what I started doing last year is choosing the latest edition from the shelf and reading it from cover to cover. First thing I noticed when I started doing that: Wow, there are a lot of stories in these “year’s best” anthologies that just aren’t. The best, I mean. Sure, picking the “best” is a judgment call on the part of the editor, and this particular editor had a pretty good track record for satisfying my fiction needs, but he picked a lot of stinkers, too, stories I read all the way through with a furrowed brow and, when I got to the end, asked myself, “That’s it? That’s how it ends? What the fuck?”
To be fair, there are more hits than misses, and since I began doing the cover-to-cover thing I’ve discovered lots of writers I’d never known before that I want to read more of now, so on the whole it’s a win. If I want to get through them all, however, I’ll have to step up my game. I finished the two latest editions last year and I have more than twenty on the shelf. Working backward at this rate, I won’t finish the oldest edition (currently the 8th annual collection, but I might find older editions if I start haunting the book store again) until after my 72nd birthday.
This Is Drivel 